In this paper I reconsider Sweetser's (1990) proposal to include 'speech-act modality' in the categories of modality expressed by natural language alongside the traditional cases of root and epistemic modality. I propose a reanalysis of her examples using the relevance-theoretic notion of metarepresentation. Rather than assuming that there is a separate speech-act domain for modal operators in natural language to range over, I suggest that the material embedded under modal operators is sometimes used metarepresentationally, a possibility which is independently motivated and well manifested in other logical operators. 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

In this paper I will present and defend an analysis of (a sample of) the English modal auxiliary verbs using a relevance-theoretic semantic and pragmatic framework. I will start by discussing previous analyses of modality in English with an eye to explaining how a cluster of related meanings- epistemic, root, and other- is expressed by the same set of lexical items. I will then go on to develop a unitary semantic approach to the English toodais, treating them as (mostly) incomplete propositional operators. After defending the details of my semantic account, I will show how the proposed semantics can give rise to the range of root interpretations modal verbs can receive in context. Epistemic interpretations require some further theoretical machinery, which will make crucial use of the notion of metarepresentation. Finally, I will sketch the differences between natural-language interpretations of modal operators and their alethic/logical uses.

this paper was partially supported by NIH Grant # F32 MH65020-A1

CONTENTS Introduction. The expression of modality in Korean i I. Scope of investigation i II. Structure of thesis i III. General expository practice ii III.I. Abbreviations ii III.II. Data transcription iii III.III. Data glossing iv III.IV. Data sources and source abbreviations v Chapter 1 Preliminaries 1 1.1. Modality 1 1.1.1. The concept of modality 1 1.1.2. A notional model of modality 5 1.1.3. A taxonomy of modalities 13 1.1.3.1. The basic dichotomy - epistemic and deontic modality 14 1.1.3.2. Epistemic modality 15 1.1.3.3. Deontic modality 17 1.1.3.4. Evidentials 19 1.1.3.5. Dynamic modality 20 1.1.3.6. Volitive modality 22 1.1.3.7. Other types of modality 23 1.2. Korean 24 1.2.1. General language data 24 1.2.2. Classification 25 1.2.3. Phonology 27 1.2.4. Morphology 29 1.2.5. Syntax 31 Chapter 2 Mood 34 2.1. The concept of mood 34 2.2. The verbal system of speech levels 39 2.3. A taxonomy of mood in Korean 42 2.3.1. Neutral mood 2

A fundamental principle in Cognitive Linguistics is that semantics is, indeed, primarily cognitive and not a matter of relationships between language and the world (or truth conditions with respect to a model). This principle becomes especially manifest in the research into facets of meaning and grammatical organization which crucially makes use of

Perkins and Pagliuca, 1994] contributes to the emergence of unfavourable meaning

This paper deals with the semantics of the Evidential marker in Northern Ostyak. As far as I know, the semantics of grammaticalized Evidentials has not been studied in detail for the (eastern) Uralic languages, although in the modal system of some of them the Evidential category plays an important role. I will analyze the different meanings of the Ostyak Evidentials, and suggest that the apparent variety of meanings can be deduced from one basic prototype. This model, I believe, may have a descriptive cross-linguistic value. Furthermore, it supports two points sometimes raised in the linguistic literature: that the Evidentials should be treated separately from the epistemics; and that often they go back historically to the Perfect. The paper is organized in the following way. In section 1 I present the morphology of the Ostyak Evidentials and previous proposals about them. Section 2 outlines the role of Evidentials in modal systems in general. Central to the paper is section 3, where I suggest a core of semantics for the Evidential markers. More detailed examples will be given in sections 4 and 5, and independent arguments supporting it will be given in section 6. Section 7 discusses the relationship between the Evidential and the Perfect. Unless indicated otherwise, I refer to the data that I myself collected during expeditions between

The set of English modal verbs is widely recognised to communicate two broad clusters of meanings: epistemic and root modal meanings. A number of researchers have claimed that root meanings are acquired earlier than epistemic ones; this claim has subsequently been employed in the linguistics literature as an argument for the position that English modal verbs are polysemous (Sweetser 1990). In this paper I offer an alternative explanation for the later emergence of epistemic interpretations by liniking them to the development of the child's theory of mind (Wellman 1990). If correct, this hypothesis might have important implications for the shape of the semantics of modal verbs.

The aim of this paper is to reconsider certain assumptions about conceptual structure which have become influential in recent Cognitive Science and which are associated in particular with the Cognitive Linguistics research agenda. I will outline three areas within the Cognitive Linguistics theory of concepts which seem to create some difficulties in their present formulation: the 'embodied cognition' idea, the function of imagery and the role of metaphor in the structure of concepts.

This paper discusses whether there are elements in spoken Sinhala that can be appropriately labeled auxiliary verbs, adopting the framework of grammaticalization theory (Hopper and Traugott 1993). While auxiliaries are thought of as a nearly universal cross-linguistic category (Steele 1978), the term is not mentioned in standard works on Sinhala (Gair and Paolillo 1997, Gair 1998). On the basis of elicited data, it is argued that a number of elements can be fruitfully analyzed as auxiliaries, while other elements resist such a classification, and thus pose a challenge to current definitions of the term auxiliary in grammaticalization theory. 1.